ACRL Issues Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is pleased to announce its new Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians, which reads:

Scholarship by academic librarians advances the fields of library and information science, influences practices of aligned professions, and informs effective advocacy. In support of broad and timely dissemination of library and information science scholarship, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) encourages academic librarians to publish in open access journals. When academic librarians choose to publish in subscription-based journals, ACRL recommends a standard practice of depositing the final accepted manuscript in a repository to make that version openly accessible. The author should be responsible for determining at what date the deposited manuscript becomes openly accessible, taking into account applicable institutional or funder policies, as well as other relevant considerations. ACRL further encourages academic librarians to make other forms of scholarship, such as monographs, presentations, grey literature, and data, openly accessible.

It is also imperative that publishers of library and information science scholarship explore and implement publishing models to make their content openly accessible as soon as possible. Librarians who are editors, reviewers, and authors should assist with this effort by engaging with their publishers about these models.

Approved by the ACRL Board of Directors at their meeting on June 25, 2016, the policy statement was developed by ACRL’s research and scholarly environment committee with feedback from members and the broader community then vetted by the ACRL standards committee.

“As our profession adapts to new roles and a changing academic landscape, it is timely to have an official policy statement encouraging academic librarians to model open access publishing decisions for their own work as they advocate for discipline faculty and researchers to choose open access outlets to disseminate their research,” remarked ACRL president Irene M.H. Herold, university librarian at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

“This is an important step in affirming widely-held values and norms in the profession regarding open access,” noted Shan C. Sutton, immediate past chair of ACRL’s research and scholarly environment committee and vice dean of university libraries at the University of Arizona. “More broadly, the policy statement could serve as a model for other professional organizations and scholarly societies to emulate in advocating for open access among their own members.”